On 10/07/13 09:53, Glenn Golden wrote: > grep, when considered as an 'application'
There is no requirement that grep must be implemented as a POSIX application. 'grep' can be written entirely in machine code. As far as POSIX is concerned, 'grep' could even be a mechanical Turk, i.e., not implemented via computer at all. As a practical matter, users generally prefer implementations that support useful extensions to POSIX to implementations that support only POSIX and nothing more. Supporting a strict-POSIX option for 'grep' sounds like it wouldn't be worth the hassle for us. Perhaps I'm wrong, and I could be proven wrong if someone wrote an easy-to-maintain patch that implements strict-POSIX behavior for 'grep'. At any rate, it's not an urgent matter, as there's no POSIX-conformance issue here, and little practical benefit to any such change.
